Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Published 1988 · 160 pages · 25,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Short Fiction
How hard is Kitchen to read?
Kitchen scores 20 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 18 out of 100
- Deliberately simple, sensory vocabulary. Food and domestic objects dominate.
- Sentence structure: 18 out of 100
- Abstraction: 20 out of 100
- Almost entirely concrete and sensory. Emotion conveyed through objects and actions.
- Information density: 30 out of 100
- Brief but concentrated. Every sentence carries weight in a novella this short.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- Linear and direct. The emotional logic is straightforward.
- Symbolic density: 35 out of 100
- The kitchen itself, food, sleep — everyday objects carry all the thematic meaning.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- Completely sincere. No distance between narrator and feeling.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- A second loss creates uncertainty, but the ending offers tentative warmth.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- Simple linear novella. No structural complexity.
How Kitchen is regarded
Kitchen holds a literary regard score of 59 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.